Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
The Problem of CSS Form Elements is at Smashing Magazine.
Seven Things Still Missing from CSS at .net magazine.
Video from the recent W3Conf are available on YouTube.
The Google Glass Feature No One is Talking About. Is Google becoming Big Brother?
Lerio Designs has blog posts with weekly roundups of web design and development resources that is excellent and worth subscribing to.
Anna Debenham has a very concise and clear post about using “rel” to establish relationships between people on her blog. It was a Valentine’s Day post, but the infomation is good any time of the year.
This fantastic post by Pamela Wilson on Copyblogger should be reproduced and used in every beginning web design class. It’s called The Essentials of Human Web Design.
NIcholas Zakas looks at the HTML5 and JavaScript that goes into Gmail’s attachment feature in Dissecting Gmail’s Email Attachments.
The current recommendation on longdesc. Things have changed in the screen reader world.
If you follow any women in tech on Twitter you are probably aware of the horror story told by Sarah Parmenter recently. It prompted several others to speak up as well. Here’s a place to start to find links to all their stories: Harassment of Women in Tech Never Ends.
The other day I mentioned a post at CSS Tricks about whether lists in nav elements were a good idea. Chris got a lot of comments and has a second post sharing his conclusions about the question: Wrapup of Navigation in Lists.
While responsive web design has taken off like a rocket, the question of what to do with images in a design that adapts to any device that might be used to display it is still under investigation. I’ve gathered some resources to help you understand the issues and see some of the tests and demos that have be done.
I don’t think we have a final answer that will become “best practice” yet, but there are a lot of great minds grappling with the issues.
Navigation in Lists: To Be or Not to Be is an important post by Chris Coyier. It talks about how using an unordered list as navigation may not be the great idea we thought it was. If you, like me, use unordered lists in all your navigation, you need to read this post.
If you haven’t checked out the new blog Women and Tech you must look at it. Amazing design and functions. Why not read their latest interview while you’re there: Christina Truong.
The Chinese New Year is coming. It will soon be “my” year for great good fortune – the year of the snake. Here’s a look at how Apple thinks about the marketing opportunities in the celebration of the Chinese New Year.
Two articles about the title attribute provide new thinking on the usefulness of the attribute. From David Bell, I thought title text improved accessibility. I was wrong. An update from the Paciello Group Blog, Using the HTML title attribute – updated. I’m going to have to rethink my use of the title attribute in affiliate links to serve as a notice that the link is to an affiliate. May simply state it in the text instead.
Ars Technica talked to the Congresswoman from Silicon Valley at CES. It’s worth reading her thoughts on where tech legislation will go in 2013.
Okay, never asked questions. Seldom is an exaggeration. But always that philosophical question lingers in the air: why are you here? These SAQs (okay NAQs) will explain everything.
Q: Why are you here?
A: I started here because I wanted to talk about how non-web-standards-based and non-teachable most of the tech books I was using to teach with were. Books are better now, so I mostly talk nice about them.
Q: Do you have any really great tips?
A: I have a lot of tips, but this is the best one. In fact, it is such a great tip I’m calling it Virginia’s Law Against Unintended HTML. It goes like this:
Play with the way your content will look before the content is on the page, not after.
Virginia’s Law Against Unintended HTML is so all-encompassing it applies to blog users and Dreamweaver users, too.*
Q: What’s this teacher thing?
A: Well, I’m an educator. You thought I was a dream in PHP coder? No, I’m an educator. So when I talk about web design or technology or web education, it’s always through that peculiar filter.
Q: Who cares about that web education crap, anyway?
A: Mostly teachers and students and web standards gurus and accessibility advocates and corporate trainers and human resource managers and small businesses in search of a web site. Even self-taught learners scrolling among Google results. Are you anything like those people?
Q: You’re always going on about women. What’s up with that?
A: I support good work from others. I’m not the jealous type so it doesn’t bother me to promote other people’s work rather than my own. I support good work from both men and women, but I love to point out what women do because they are a misused and misunderstood element in the tech world. I’m a woman, so I know this. I’m also old – would you rather I was always going on about old people?
Q: What’s a good book to read about web design?
A: Start with books about HTML and CSS. Read a lot of those. After you get really good at those two things, read books about JavaScript or PHP. I’ve recommended a few books over the years. Read good books about design and Photoshop, too. Read the books I wrote, for gosh sakes, and buy them brand new, not used. Thank you.
Q: What are you learning about lately?
A: I’m quite interested in HTML5 and study it a lot. The new CSS is fascinating, too. I like new ideas. If your job is to produce HTML emails for big corporations, I recommend you study HTML 3.2 a lot. You can make big money by doing things from the old days that everyone else has forgotten how to do. HTML 3.2 anyone?
Q: Has social media changed the world?
A: Wait, I will answer as soon as I update my Twitter and take my turn in Words with Friends. Oh, look what my friend said on Facebook – isn’t that cute? Uhh, what was the question?
*Look! A Footnote: Some people refer to this concept as separation of content from presentation, but I refer to it as Virginia’s Law Against Unintended HTML.